


I Saw Smoke

by scioscribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Canadian Shack, Casual Sex, F/F, Post-Apocalypse, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 16:45:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13505637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: "You can go a long way without finding a wood-burning stove," Tasha said.  "I was hoping you might let me wait out the winter."





	I Saw Smoke

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RowynSN](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RowynSN/gifts).



Tasha had been watching the house all morning.

It was just a shack, but since the fall, shacks were more fiercely guarded than the McMansions.  A shack could be everything you needed wrapped up in a few hundred square feet: wood-burning stove, hand-pump well, good stock of laid-in weapons.  Sometimes even kerosene lanterns.  Light, warmth, water.  The woods promised food.  If she’d known at seven how hungry she’d get at _thirty_ -seven over the sight of a cottontail hopping through the snow, she’d have had one tearstained Beatrix Potter collection on her hands, that was for sure.

She wanted the house.  Maybe it wasn't a shack, really, maybe when it looked that sturdy, it became a cabin, no matter how small it was.  All the better.

Whoever was inside it—and she knew there was somebody, she’d seen the smoke from the chimney—would have to come out eventually.  Then she would size them up.  Could they be befriended?  Bargained with, partnered with?  Would they pretend to be trustworthy and then kill her in her sleep?  Would they take a shot at her just for the skulking she was doing? She knew she looked healthy, at least. The cold had put flares of color in her face and while a diet of greasy Slim Jims and candy bars, indestructible gas station food, had given her back her uneven teenaged complexion, while she didn't look _good_ , she did still look human, not corrupted, not transformed. Would whoever was in the house look the same?

She found out three hours later when a woman came out on the porch and lit a cigarette; stood there smoking it with one hand cupped over the flame so the blustery late-February wind wouldn’t blow it out.

The woman had long, glass-smooth black hair that she wore down, probably to keep her ears warm as much as anything else.  She wore a beat-up brown leather jacket with a fleecy collar, making her look like some kind of old-time aviator.  No gloves.  Her hands were chapped, reddened by the cold, and big, broad in a way that had always made Tasha’s knees a little weak.  Not that she could afford weak knees—or weak anything else—now or ever again.

But, to the extent that she could size anybody up, she thought she had, and she thought this woman might not shoot her just for daring to come down the hillside.  Besides, she hadn’t seen a rifle out on the porch, which was something.

Tasha walked slowly into view, her own gloved hands in the air.  “Okay to come down?”

The woman tossed her cigarette off into the snow.  Almost but not quite expressionless—there was a flicker of something in her eyes, though it could have just been the sun winking off of them—she nodded.

“If you want them,” Tasha said, as she closed the rest of the gap, “I’ve got cigarettes.”  They were good currency now that the world worked in so many ways on the rules of prison.  They were all stuck there together with few pleasures and nothing to buy, so a little kick of nicotine and the hope that you were draining the life out of yourself breath by breath was like bullion.  “Salems, Kools.”  She didn’t smoke herself, but not because she was immune to the appeal.  Just because she didn’t want to waste them.

“What are you here for?” the woman said.

“I saw smoke.  From your chimney.  Fireplace or stove?”

“Stove.”

“You can go a long way without finding a wood-burning stove,” Tasha said.  “I was hoping you might let me wait out the winter.”  She tugged one glove off with her teeth and held out her bare hand, as if that somehow made her more vulnerable, showed more clearly that she meant no harm.  “Tasha Lang.”

After just a second’s hesitation, the woman’s rough, reddened hand met hers.  “Sarah Wu.”

“Can I come inside, at least?  I wouldn’t mind a chance to get warm.”

Sarah bit down on her lower lip.  She had perfectly even white teeth.  “Yeah.”  A little more life seemed to get breathed into her and a flush of color spread across her face, turning her cheeks rose-pink.  “I haven’t—I haven’t seen many people lately.  It took me a minute to even realize you were a person. A real person.”  She stepped aside and let Tasha go past her into the house.  Something about the way she did it made Tasha believe completely that she’d gone a long time between conversations: it was like she was doing everything in the wrong order.  It wasn’t frightening, though—Tasha had been with people before who were the wrong kind of off, something in their heads twisted or snapped by all the permission the end of the world had granted them—and Sarah didn’t ping her as that kind.  Just half gone into the wilderness.

But the shack was, to her relief, homelike, not one of those places with gnawed-on rabbit bones in the corners or chalked pictures of Them on the wall, to be worshiped like gods.  There was a braided rug on the floor and a cheap little vanilla wood bookcase filled with paperbacks.  It was just one room—the toilet stood awkwardly in the corner with a calico curtain on a ceiling bar pulled halfway closed around it, and there was no bath or shower at all—but it was warm, comfortable, and reassuringly _civilized_.  Tasha stood there trembling like a sighted deer.  Now, she was distantly aware, she was the one who looked like she didn’t remember how to be human. That could get her dead if she didn't quit it. No one was obligated to take the chance that she was just easily spooked instead of being about to molt there right in front of their eyes.

The sound of the door closing behind her triggered something skittish, instinctive: she almost jumped.

Sarah, thank God, didn’t apologize for closing her own door in her own home instead of letting the winter wind whistle in at them, didn't call attention to Tasha's alarm.  She just started pulling off her boots and said, “You can take your coat off if you want.  Just fling it anywhere.  Where are you from?”

She said it in the same tone she’d said everything.  To her surprise, Tasha found herself liking that, the uncanniness of it.  It seemed more honest, somehow, than pretending that living through all they had hadn’t damaged them at all.  Maybe they should all be stilted, each of them the lone survivor of some personal lost country. Maybe they should stop killing each other at the first sign that something was wrong. Something _was_ wrong, wasn't it?

“Rochester.”

“Never been,” Sarah said.

“It used to be nice,” Tasha said.  That was the kind of thing that, if she had said it a year ago, would still have brought an achey, tear-thickened throb to her voice.  Now, she was matter-of-fact.  Rochester used to be nice, but not anymore, not now that niceness was so scarce.  “Enough jobs, a little bit of artiness.  Good queer community.”  She rolled up her sleeve to show the small rainbow tattoo on the back of her wrist. It would get seen eventually, so if it would be a problem, she wanted to know up-front, while there was still time to make a peaceful exit.

Sarah said, “I gave myself a tattoo a while back.”

“Where?  Of what?”

“On my leg.”  Her finger inscribed a small circle on the inside of her jean-clad thigh.  “Mistletoe.”

“Why mistletoe?”

“Because it was Christmas and I was drunk.  I don’t know that it looks like mistletoe, but that’s what it’s supposed to be.”  She kept circling her finger around and around.  “Do you want to see?”

For the first time in what felt like forever, a slippery, inviting heat licked its way up and down her body.  How long had it been since she’d last even bothered to jerk off?  These days, it was more clinical than anything else, just a substitute for a sleeping pill.  She nodded.  Yeah, she wanted to see.

Sarah unbuttoned her jeans and pushed them down over her sharp, spare hips.  She had another tattoo there, a kind of snakeskin line tracing her hipbone, but it looked professional, the scales blue and green and silver.  She was wearing thick woolen socks, dark burgundy, and while she stepped out of her jeans, she kept the socks on.  The line of that deep red against the pale skin of her calf made Tasha feel weak.  Sarah parted her legs a little and gracelessly pushed against her own skin until the inside of her left thigh came into Tasha’s vision.  It was an inept Bic-blue thing that didn’t look like mistletoe at all.  It looked like a bruise somebody had been determined to leave.

Sarah was wearing thin cotton underwear, light peach, and the color darkened slightly just at her cleft.  Tasha could smell her now, like sea salt and musk.

“You don’t waste time,” Tasha said.  “Do you?”

Sarah shrugged.  “There’s not much time left.  But suit yourself.  You can stay the winter either way, maybe, if the food lasts long enough.  If it doesn’t, fucking me isn’t going to get you any extra days.  I’ll take a pack of cigarettes, though, if you’re offering.  They’re a downright bitch to find out here.  You’re pretty.”

Still that same tone of voice.  She used no pauses at all.

If Tasha got down on her knees and rubbed her thumb roughly over that snakeskin braid, would the scales flake off, iridescent and real and not inked figments after all?  The cold was supposed to have killed off most everybody who had changed, but it was warm here, wasn't it?  If Sarah was one of Them, if she’d been contaminated, the wood stove wouldn't do a damn thing to help Tasha live through the winter.

But even with that in mind, she couldn’t bring herself to go back out into the cold.  She said, “Mistletoe is poisonous, you know,” and with one hand, she stroked the patchy, inexpert design.  She tucked her fingers in under the elastic of Sarah’s underwear and moved them slowly.

Sarah closed her eyes.  “I know,” she said, as Tasha rubbed her.  As she brought her other hand up to that stretch of seeming snakeskin.  Would it be as smooth as the rest of her, hot as iron and hard as marble?  Or something else?  Sarah was beginning to move her hips forward, grinding herself against Tasha’s fingers.  “I know,” she said again.  “I know it’s poisonous.  But it reminds me of the way things used to be.”

Tasha stroked her thumb across the tattoo.  It was as supple as silk.  The firelight threw shadows and waves of orange light across Sarah’s bare lower half.  From this angle, her socks looked black as old blood.

“The food will last,” Tasha said.  She stroked Sarah’s clit.  “Even if we’re hungry, and I’m sure we’ve both been starving before.”  She straddled Sarah’s outthrust leg and ground herself against it, flint sliding against steel to make fire in a place and time where heat was rare and necessary.


End file.
